Buonconvento: Brick-Walled Borgo of the Val d'Arbia

---

The Crete Senesi are all curve and crest — and then, at their south-western foot, the land goes suddenly flat and the hills' pale clay turns to fired brick. Buonconvento is the market town of that valley floor: walled, level, ten minutes' walk end to end, with a museum that holds a Duccio and a history that once held an emperor. It is also among the easiest tastes of the Crete you can reach without a car.

Most travellers meet Buonconvento at speed, on the Cassia south towards Montalcino, and register only a red-brown blur of walls. Slow down once. Inside those walls is a town of some three thousand people that the association of the borghi più belli d'Italia — the certified register of Italy's most beautiful villages — carries on its own list, under a rubric that settles the palette question in seven words: i colori del cotto e delle crete, the colours of fired brick and clay.

A good gathering, walled in brick

The name is the town's founding argument: bonus conventus, a good gathering — a fortunate community, prospering where the Arbia meets the Ombrone and where the Via Francigena, the great pilgrim road to Rome, crossed the water. Pilgrims broke their journeys here; trade followed them; Siena, whose southern approach this was, wrapped the whole town in brick in the fourteenth century. The walls survive remarkably intact, Guelph merlons and all, and they were built mean: no openings at all except two gates, the Porta Senese facing Siena to the north and the Porta Romana facing Rome to the south. Only the Sienese gate still stands — the Porta Romana was destroyed by retreating German troops in 1944 — so the town now greets you the way it always greeted travellers coming down from Siena.

Inside, one straight street does the work of a whole hill town. Via Soccini runs the borgo north to south, named for the local family whose sixteenth-century freethinkers gave European history a heresy of their own, and lined with the town's power in miniature: the Palazzo Podestarile with its rectangular fourteenth-century tower — a small cousin, as the museum foundation itself notes, of Siena's Torre del Mangia — and twenty-five stone coats of arms of the Sienese governors set into its facade; the brick-fronted town hall; the church of Santi Pietro e Paolo, whose facade carries a little marble stone incised with the date 1103.

The emperor who got no further

That church anchors Buonconvento's one moment at the centre of European history. In the summer of 1313 Henry VII of Luxembourg — the emperor who had crossed the Alps to bend Italy back towards the imperial idea, and had just pronounced sentence from Pisa against Robert of Anjou — marched south and got exactly this far. At Buonconvento he died suddenly; the borgo's own account places his deathbed in the church of Santi Pietro e Paolo itself. Poison was said at once, and said for centuries — the encyclopaedias now record the rumour as wrongly told, which has never stopped it being retold. Either way, the imperial project in Italy effectively ended on this flat valley floor, in a walled market town a morning's ride short of Siena.

A Duccio behind a liberty facade

Buonconvento's second surprise stands halfway along via Soccini at number 18: the Museo d'Arte Sacra della Val d'Arbia, the valley's collected altarpieces gathered under one roof — a collection begun in 1926, when the parish priest don Crescenzio Massari started retrieving works from the church's stores. Its home, Palazzo Ricci Socini, is a story in itself: in 1907 the Ricci family had the architect Gino Chierici rework the building in the floral liberty style, so the region's medieval painting now hangs behind one of the most elegant art-nouveau facades in the province — the town keeps a whole modest constellation of liberty buildings, an urban fashion that took root here with curiously unprovincial results.

The rooms run the Sienese school from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, and the first ones set the level: Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna col Bambino of 1290–1295, with Pietro Lorenzetti, Luca di Tommé and a refined Annunciation by Andrea di Bartolo nearby. The fifteenth century brings Sano di Pietro and a splendid Madonna with Child and Angels by Matteo di Giovanni; the sixteenth, Brescianino and other followers of Beccafumi; the seventeenth, Rutilio Manetti's Caravaggesque Ecce homo. The last room gathers five centuries of goldsmiths' work — fifteenth to nineteenth — from the valley's parish churches around a large marble tabernacle of the later 1400s that once stood on the Via Cassia bridge over the Ombrone — the road, as ever here, having the final word.

The flat approach

Buonconvento is a rare piece of Crete country that asks nothing of a driver, because it asks nothing of a hill. Our Crete Senesi guide is honest that the clay hills themselves are a landscape drive; this is the exception on their edge. The 114 coach runs from Siena via Monteroni to Buonconvento on its way to Montalcino — times at at-bus.it — and the town has its own railway station on the national network, so a carless morning here is genuinely practical: walls, museum, lunch, and the Crete rising pale on the near horizon. Drivers simply take the Cassia south, as the Montalcino run always has; walkers will recognise the logic instantly, because it is the Via Francigena's logic — flat, watered, and on the way. For everything else beyond the walls, the day-trips hub sets the compass.

Practical information

Museo d'Arte Sacra della Val d'Arbia: via Soccini 18. June–October 2026: Wednesday–Friday 9:00–13:00; Saturday–Sunday 10:00–13:00 and 15:30–18:30; closed Monday and Tuesday; ticket office shuts 30 minutes before closing. €5 full, €3 reduced; a €6/€4 cumulative ticket adds the Museo della Mezzadria Senese, the town's museum of Tuscan sharecropping. Groups and schools by booking year-round: +39 338 423 3977. Getting there without a car: the 114 coach from Siena (at-bus.it for the day's times) or the train to Buonconvento's own station (trenitalia.com for services). By car: the SS2 Via Cassia south from Siena; the walls are minutes from the road. Pairing: the Crete Senesi loop inland, or onward south-west to Montalcino.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Buonconvento one of the borghi più belli d'Italia? Yes — the association of Italy's most beautiful villages carries Buonconvento on its own list, with a profile filed under "the colours of fired brick and clay".

What is in the Museo d'Arte Sacra della Val d'Arbia? The Val d'Arbia's sacred art gathered in Palazzo Ricci Socini: a Duccio Madonna col Bambino of 1290–1295, works by Pietro Lorenzetti, Sano di Pietro and Matteo di Giovanni, Rutilio Manetti's Ecce homo, and five centuries of goldsmiths' work from the valley's parish churches.

Can you visit Buonconvento from Siena without a car? Yes — more easily than almost anywhere else in the Crete country: the 114 coach from Siena calls at Buonconvento en route to Montalcino, and the town has its own railway station. The borgo itself is flat and small enough to walk in a morning.

By the Siena & Toscana editors